9 August 2013 Volume: 23 Issue: 15 Human faces of Monet’s demons Benedict Coleridge ........................................1 Civil liberties in a grave new world Bill Calcutt ............................................. 3 Crime kids served celebrity gods Tim Kroenert ............................................6 When mines and football clubs betray the common good Andrew Hamilton .........................................8 Pilgrims walk with shadow of Church abuse Ailsa Piper ............................................. 10 Australia’s human dumping ground Nauru Walter Hamilton ........................................ 13 Migrant factory worker’s story Various ............................................... 15 Election coverage you can trust Michael McVeigh ........................................ 18 Vulnerable are victims of the federal game of thrones Andrew Hamilton ........................................ 20 Australian republicans demand satisfaction Ray Cassin ............................................ 22 Australia’s shrinking moral and intellectual horizons Ray Cassin ............................................ 25 Abused girls’ institution trauma Madeleine Hamilton ...................................... 28 Community fear feeds Fox News Muslim bashing Ruby Hamad ........................................... 31 Australia complicit in PNG’s Bougainville blight Ellena Savage .......................................... 33 Flawed humanity of a police shooting martyr Tim Kroenert ........................................... 35 Pope’s Catholic health check Andrew Hamilton ........................................ 37 Rudd is the Greens’ accidental hero John Warhurst .......................................... 39 We’re all boat people after all Brian Doyle ............................................ 41 A reading list for climate change deniers Greg Foyster ........................................... 43 Bless the troublemakers Libby Hart ............................................. 45 Labor’s performance enhancing drug Michael Mullins ......................................... 47 Liam Jurrah and the Northern Territory’s jail-fail Mike Bowden ........................................... 48 Eureka Street is published fortnightly Responsibility for editorial content is online, a minimum of 24 times per year accepted by the publisher. by Eureka Street Magazine Pty Ltd Requests for permission to reprint Unsolicited manuscripts will not be material from the website and this edition returned. should be addressed to the Editor. PO Box 553 Tel +61 3 9427 7311 Richmond Fax +61 3 9428 4450 VIC 3121 [email protected] Australia ©2013 EurekaStreet.com.au ©2013 EurekaStreet.com.au 2 Volume 23 Issue: 15 9 August 2013 Human faces of Monet’s demons REVIEWS Benedict Coleridge The other night I scored a ticket to the MTC’s production of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. The play depicts 17th century Salem’s descent into chaos as women are suspected of being witches and of practicing the dark arts on God-fearing puritans. In one memorable scene three women appear to be terrified out of their wits by a demon climbing along a roof beam — it seems they’re possessed, the demon taking control of them. The vision of people being possessed by demons elicited laughter from the audience, as did the ‘irrational’ fear that the spectacle drew from the other characters in the play, the judges, ministers and men of authority who scampered hither and thither. The Crucible dramatises a time when people thought of the world as full of competing forces, spirits of good and evil, clashing around them. And they understood themselves in terms of what Charles Taylor calls the ‘porous self’ — a self that can be invaded and controlled by these external forces raging through the universe. I suspect the laughter of the audience speaks of a modern understanding of the individual as self-contained, a self that isn’t preyed on by forces at large in the world but that can be developed and shaped at will by the individual. The American sociologist Robert Bellah calls this the ‘therapeutic self’: if an individual has problems, these can be resolved by ‘therapy’ of various kinds. The self can be built, enhanced and shaped as we like. So the splendours of our Facebook pages or LinkedIn profiles become means of building the self — changing its contours and shading, shaping other people’s perceptions of us so that, in turn, we can think differently of ourselves. This understanding easily directs us towards fantasy — people have dreams of turning themselves into the embodiment of certain ‘forms’. That’s why you have the well-worn tropes of ‘social change activist’, ‘incredible young leader’ and ‘visionary’ — those self-descriptive taglines that run across countless Generation Y Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and personal websites. We can think of this as a process of self-administered therapy — all of these new media allow us to project ourselves onto a social screen to be received and critiqued. They can be used as means of convincing ourselves that we match up to the fantastical self-images we aspire to and they become a way of communicating our confidence that we can determine the shape of our lives. But interestingly, there’s a point at which the language of therapy seems inadequate, a line beyond which the self seems so uncontrolled and unruly that we ©2013 EurekaStreet.com.au 1 Volume 23 Issue: 15 9 August 2013 return, like the Salem witch hunters, to the language of ‘demons’ to describe it. In fact, over the last decade demons have been plaguing the world — celebrities across the planet have been waging a war against these diabolical spirits. According to the headlines Keith Urban ‘battled his demons’, Heather Mills urged Macca Paul McCartney to ‘confront’ his, Brendan Fevola was advised to ‘excise’ the demons possessing him, and Robbie Williams went all the way and ‘exorcised’ his resident spirits. And I thought exorcism wasn’t in fashion! Pondering this Salem I found myself some days later at another Melbourne cultural offering — the National Gallery of Victoria’s Monet exhibition. Everybody loves Monet, his work has therapeutic qualities — his waterlilies draw the world up close, enfolding the viewer in a matrix of colour and sensation. But one of Monet’s works stood out in a different way — the portrait of his young son Jean Monet, painted soon after his mother Camille had died. The little boy gazes at the viewer with a bewildered sadness in his eyes. It’s the kind of image that draws one away from fantasy, the fantasy of strongly independent selves and Facebook visionaries and even the fantasy of Monet’s garden. In the medieval world, at least in urban settings, people living outside of the decorative centre of town wouldn’t have seen much in the way of colour. But walking into a church they would have been met with the splendour of icons, rich with colour. The icons weren’t just pretty, they pulled people into relationship with their subjects — you can’t stand in front of an icon and not be engaged by the eyes and face. As Rowan Williams writes of Byzantine icons, ‘the image gives directions, it essays a way of bringing you into a new place, a new perception’. For me, standing in front of Jean Monet was equally engaging. One walks in from the outside world, perhaps composing a tweet, and then there is Jean Monet who just lost his mother and doesn’t understand it, whose eyes speak of regret and confusion. Only a year before, Claude Monet painted a portrait of his wife lying on her deathbed. In the painting Camille Monet looks as though she is wrapped in a shroud, or covered by flowing water. Here is an image at once full of stillness but alive with motion, the body is still but life flows outwards towards the edge of the picture — it’s a deeply meditative piece of art. And it comes to mind that Monet, in a period of deep grief and loss, made what was in his career a rare decision: to paint other people. The artist forgot himself in contemplating the faces of his wife and his son, in depicting the faces of death and of incomprehension. And it struck me that we need icons like this — icons of incomprehension, reminders of the fragile self that, behind its virtual armour, is beset by doubt and demons. ©2013 EurekaStreet.com.au 2 Volume 23 Issue: 15 9 August 2013 Civil liberties in a grave new world INTERNATIONAL Bill Calcutt Since the Second World War, Western democracies have championed human rights, decrying the abuse of civil liberties in undemocratic states. A defining feature of the Cold War was trenchant Western criticism of the pervasive surveillance of citizens in authoritarian Eastern Bloc states. In stark contrast Western democracies took great care in seeking to balance national security and civil liberties, often reflected in detailed legislation circumscribing the powers of intelligence agencies and upholding the rights of individuals. Australia operates under a Westminster system of democratic governance that is intended to provide checks and balances against the concentration and abuse of power. Justice Robert Marsden Hope showed great foresight in crafting Australia’s unique intelligence architecture, institutionalising the separation of information collection and analysis, national and foreign intelligence, and advisory and decision-making functions. While Hope recognised that national security agencies need to operate under the cloak of secrecy to be effective, he established mechanisms to ensure proper oversight and accountability. He emphasised